Marisacat

Christmas Night Open Thread 25 December 2006

Well… no doubt highly impolitic on Christmas Day… but Hedges is more blunt than ever: Get Carter in the January 8 issue of The Nation.

Catch the last graf…

[W]hen Rabin, who had come to despise what the occupation was doing to the citizenry of his own country, was sworn in as prime minister, the leaders of these American Jewish organizations, along with their buffoonish supporters on the Christian right, were conspicuous by their absence. On one of Rabin’s first visits to Washington after he assumed office, according to one of his aides, he was informed that a group of American Jewish leaders were available to meet him. The surly old general, whose gravelly cigarette voice seemed to rise up from below his feet, curtly refused. He told his entourage he did not have time to waste on “scumbags.”

One thing I am hoping for in The New Year: more and more public people cut the last tie… that Ray McGovern drops obeisance to Poppy, that Hersh stops pulling his punches over Israel…

I recently saw a quote from Moyers calling CPB – and certainly PBS – to become radical… BRAVO!

Like this:

Related

and what holiday delicacy is this? why, i do believe it’s an artfully constructed Spanische Windtorte,, in the thread of which our knight-errant’s manservant suffers grevious persecutions at the hands of a french.

My last few weeks in the paying job have been a little unpleasant. A lot unpleasant, making time here on the blog difficult to come by. It’s discouraging, after 9.5 years at a place, to have it end badly.

But the days I have left there are countable on one hand. Good thing.

America’s Second Harvest

by mcjoan on Sat Dec 23, 2006 at 08:14:22 PM PST”

does kos give that good a fellowship?

I never read kos much in all my years there, so I can’t assess his vicissitudes, though I am surprised he is throwing his support to the bots of his site. which I guess explains why there is a diary on his site alledging sen. brownback as a potential savior of africa.

and except for dood, who can be found in various places, there is no humor there, anymore. “Trucker pundit?” a heartbeat away from michael richards.

Clueless fool… and this is why the white boyz don’t get why Obama’s hype is not catching in the African American communities. They actually believe that Dobson is a contemporary of MLK. Cluess to the fact that MLK used the pulpit as a tool to fight for freedom whereas todays evangelical wingnuts use the pulpit to curtail freedoms.

Jesse and Al know this because they were there… so in order to rewrite history the Clintons “created” Obama in their own likeness… to repeat their own words…”God God God… no message”.

I call it the Great Recolonialization. It reminds me of the old adage:

When the missionaries went to Africa, they had the bibles and the people had the land;

The missionaries taught the people to pray and when they looked up the people had the bibles and the missionaries had the land.

It certainly is . . . instructive to check out the various comment threads devoted to the late Gerald Ford. A lot of amazingly bad historical memory on display. Murray Kempton once said that people who succeed in forgetting their pasts are rewarded by having them forgotten by pretty much everyone else. He was talking about Alger Hiss’s ability to get people to think he might not have been guilty as charged, but it applies to so many others (it’s certainly much more correct than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ridiculously inaccurate dictum about there being no second acts in American lives, just because there was none in your life Scotty . . .). I hated how at the time Ford was hailed for “bringing us together,” and how his administration was “a time for healing,” and that afterwards we were successfully healed. I remember a nation that was totally adrift under the “command” of a president as ineffectual and clueless as Herbert Hoover had been, one that refused to own up to just how awful were the things it had done in the previous decade, and headed off to the disco to snort coke and hump indiscriminately. Now we’ll have the usual deluge of platitudes about how Ford was one of those bipartisan unifier types who tried to bridge differences across party lines, blah, blah, blah, completely ignoring the fact that he became House Minority Leader in 1965 by engineering the ouster of someone who was a genuine accomodationist (Charles Halleck of Indiana who’d refused to back Goldwater in 1964), and that he performed exactly the type of grandstanding obstructionist act that Newt Gingrich would do 30 years later. Some unifier.

At least you could say he was an honest man, with virtually nothing to show for it when he left the White House. He then embarked on what may be the least dignified post-Presidential career in history, basically selling his name and face at every meet-and-greet where wealthy procine types can be found (preferably on a golf course).

Oh well, RIP Jerry. I’m sure you were a decent enough guy on a personal basis, but you’re public career is a testimony to what’s wrong with the US political system.

So.

At the age of 86, Noam Chomsky remains as active as ever in his work as a world-renowned political dissident and pioneering linguist. He has also opened a new chapter in his life, recently celebrating a one-year anniversary with his new wife, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky, his second marriage. Chomsky discusses the joys of newfound love and why it is a "pri […]

Noam Chomsky weighs in on the Black Lives Matter movement across the United States, calling it a response to the unresolved consequences of slavery and racism dating back hundreds of years. "[Slavery] is a large part of the basis for our wealth and privilege," Chomsky says. "Is there a slave museum in the United States? The first one is just b […]

Following its election in January on a pledge to confront the austerity program that's decimated Greece's economy, the Syriza government has faced a major pushback from international creditors led by Germany. Days after Greece secured a four-month extension to a loan package in exchange for new conditions on its spending, Noam Chomsky says the Euro […]

World-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky discusses why National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden should be welcomed back to the United States as a hero and why those who authorized the government surveillance he exposed should be on trial, not him. Chomsky also argues that while mass surveillance has been ineffective i […]

The Islamic State might be the best-funded radical Islamist group, perhaps in history, but the coalition air campaign that’s targeting its oil-refining operations and military assets has begun to damage…Click to Continue »

At the annual American-Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, speakers advanced Iran as an existential threat and sought to downplay differences between Israel and the US while demonstrators were arrested outside

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday the chamber was moving toward debate on a bill that would require President Barack Obama to submit any final nuclear deal with Iran for Congress' approval.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday against accepting a nuclear deal with Iran that would be a "countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare" by a country that "will always be an enemy of America".

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's advisers would recommend he veto a Senate resolution to overturn recent National Labor Relations Board reforms if the measure were to reach the White House, his administration said in a statement.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bipartisan talks on a bill to streamline the passage of trade deals through Congress are "stuck" over Democratic demands, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance said on Tuesday.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.